The Ephemeral Captured in Bubbles

News

01.04.2025

Courtesy of Reiner Opoku Office and Jiri Georg Dokoupil

Jiri Georg Dokoupil has always been fascinated by the delicate boundary between permanence and transience.

For Market Art Fair 2025, the Czech-German artist brings a new body of work that explores the fragile beauty of soap bubbles. Through both vibrant paintings and sculptural forms, Dokoupil captures the fleeting essence of colour and light, inviting the viewer to reflect on the beauty found in the briefest moments.

Throughout his artistic career, Czech-German artist Jiri Georg Dokoupil’s work has been characterised by obsessive versatility and experimentation. At Market Art Fair 2025, Galleri Susanne Ottesen will present his work in a duo exhibition alongside Nanna Abell.

Jiri Georg Dokoupil first garnered recognition for the breadth of his dynamic and expressive paintings, incorporating various materials and techniques to explore themes related to consumerism, spirituality, and the human condition, reflecting contemporary cultural and social dynamics. His practice is firmly grounded in a deep engagement with art history, combined with his playful and experimental approach. Early on, Dokoupil challenged established ideas about art, authorship, and the role of the artist in contemporary society.

photo by Stine Heger. Courtesy of Galleri Susanne Ottesen and Jiri Georg Dokoupil

Dokoupil’s wide-ranging visual worlds are created through unconventional technical inventions: he applies colour to canvas with a whip or car tyres, creates candle paintings using soot, and binds oil paints into soap bubbles, letting them burst on the surface. The artist fixes the ephemeral within each of his canvases, creating enchanting works that play with colour, light and shadow, the organic and the meticulous.

Following his exhibition “Venetian Bubbles” at Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice in 2024, this exhibition will present a new series of works exploring the theme of bubbles, featuring both paintings and glass sculptures.

The exhibition at Market Art Fair will showcase Jiri Georg Dokoupil’s signature works on canvas, where colour is captured through the delicate and fleeting nature of soap bubbles paired with paint. The vibrant, dynamic colours of the paintings emerge from the interplay between the bubble and canvas, and the moment the bubble pops, creating ever-shifting, ephemeral colour themes.

photo by Stine Heger. Courtesy of Galleri Susanne Ottesen and Jiri Georg Dokoupil

These works will be displayed alongside sculptures that bring the “living” form of bubbles into three-dimensional space, offering a striking contrast between the temporal nature of his paintings and the capturing of a bubble in its most fragile, transient moment. Through this, Dokoupil challenges the impossible: preserving the beauty of a soap bubble at its peak, frozen in time.